Review by Sam on October 30, 2026.

Man, what a fucking album! Just under fourteen minutes in total, yet considered a full-length. As a death metal guy whose favorite band is Black Sabbath, this sort of thing is completely foreign territory to me. But if this is what powerviolence is all about, then count me in. Hatred. Rage. Contempt. Misanthropy. All of these things are ultra-compressed into thirty-second bursts of pure kinetic force. To my ears, it sounds as though the vaunted HM-2 has been used to achieve that guitar tone, which naturally brings to mind bands like Entombed and Dismember. This could well be the very trait that makes Nails, a representative of what seems to be an almost exclusive subgenre, so palatable to fans of old-school death metal.

When listening to Left Hand Path or Like an Ever Flowing Stream, you have to admit that those Swedes must have been fans of hardcore. That influence is evident in the sheer speed of their skank beats and d-beats, but also in, well, the violence inherent in their music. It's just that those bands were too moribund, too gore-obsessed, and ultimately too talented to limit themselves to something as two-dimensional as hardcore. Entombed's progressive tendencies become apparent toward the end of the fourth minute of their career-defining masterpiece. This is precisely what makes Nails so appealing to someone like me. Despite their best efforts to present themselves as shorn-skulled, bench-pressing, squat-thrusting, musclebound aggro-men drenched in testosterone, it's when they decide to slow things down that they crush your fucking soul into the dirt. There's no better example than the final ten seconds of 'Scum Will Rise'. The bottom drops the fuck out, and after the first minute and twenty seconds of the album operating like a blast furnace aimed at your face, this blunt-force approach made me an instant fan.

Obviously, these guys are students of Discharge, Agnostic Front, and Sheer Terror, but the more I listen to and experience their music, the more I detect unexpected influences from bands like The Melvins and even Celtic Frost. I'm talking Monotheist here, an influence that becomes apparent on Nails' second album, Abandon All Life. At this point, we also have to discuss the cover art of Unsilent Death. This was what nudged me into giving these guys a try in the first place, because it's such an obvious nod to Hellhammer. Even the Old English, all-caps font used for the band name suggested that this might go well beyond some sloppy, poorly produced punk rock bullshit, which was my preconceived notion. This is a highly professional recording, not some miked-up rehearsal room performance where mistakes are left in for the sake of punk credibility. Nope. These dudes are dead serious about their craft.

This record smokes. And because of its extremely brief duration, I can feel perfectly justified in breaking my policy of listening to an album only once per day. I can play it during the inanity of the workday to fuel my hate, then completely zone out on all the nuances it has to offer while unwinding in the evening. This is a band with a firm grasp of songwriting dynamics within heavy metal, regardless of subgenre. They simply package their material in what appears to be an impenetrable tough-guy image. But let me assure you, this powerviolence thing is absolutely accessible to those unfamiliar with the genre, as well as anyone who might have reservations about something that is punk-adjacent. Whether it's the unbridled, speed-of-light misanthropy of the album opener, 'Conform', or the crushing death metal stomp of the latter half of 'Suffering Soul', this shit doesn't divide punks from longhairs. It unites them. Just look at the band's picture.

I have one complaint, and it's a minor one: the ending. It just sort of peters out. Don't get me wrong, it's a slow-crushing sequence, but this is the sort of material that calls for a deliberate, definitive, curb-check-style finish. You can tell they're quite proud of that final riff because they play it forever (forever in this context meaning longer than one minute), but without any real variation. Then it just sort of dies on the vine, with the drummer seemingly unsure of when to stop playing. This minor gripe hardly matters, however, if you listen to the ten-year anniversary edition, which features five additional, equally raging tracks.

Rating: 9.2 out of 10